Monday morning 14th

Snap
Mon 14 Dec 2015 06:51
23:13N 22:36W COG 262 SOG 0.5 just before dawn 14th Dec

23:13N 22:36W SOG 0.5 COG 267

Monday morning out here at the Department of Incredibly Patient People.
Cornwall has so far sadly failed to appear over the northern horizon -
perhaps this afternoon.

SOG dropped to 0.4 knots overnight which means that the elasticity of time
continues to be tested - the 2030 waypoint I mentioned last week is now 45
days distant, and the autopilot is beginning to complain from time to time,
raising the alarm and asking permission to change course.

We’re still headed west, or a bit south of west. But I have to confess that
my first thought this morning was that I ought to go pull the anchor up.
Actually, i think most people at anchor might often be doing more than 0.4
knots. Ooh look 0.6 knots and it’s only 34 days now.

Very lovely weather when you’re becalmed, nice sunshine, gentle sea,
spectacular stars at night. Kate tells me we’re due a nice display of
shooting stars EVERYWHERE on Tuesday.

Before the twentieth century, of course, everyone vaguely believed that the
universe and hence all the stars had always been much the same, forever .
There might have been arguments about how long it has all been around, but
not much about it changing at all. But then they thought - just a minute! -
IF there’s infinite amount of space, with infinite number of stars… then
the night sky should be a solid wall of star surfaces, right? Wow, imagine
that! But it’s not - which started people wondering if the stars had
started shining at different times in the past, that things were changing
rather than “always been like this”.

Eventually we discovered (mainly Hubble, I think) that everything is moving
away from everything else - an expanding universe, which lead to the Big
Bang theory and the origin of the universe not being a God Thing. Perhaps
one day there’ll be a Big Echo which would rather put the tin lid on the
infinite universe idea. Meanwhile there’s a nice display of stars every
night, not too jammed-solid because stars are born and die all the time.

Right, so I’m going to watch the dawn, then move a bit south to dodge this
4knot wind from the south, ok? But I’ll send this first….